Mercedes Schneider has developed a keen ability to ferret out the background of Reformer organizations.
The plutocrats spit them out so fast that it is hard to keep track of them.
Read here to see how Schneider identified two new ones.
Archives for category: Corporate Reform
Steven Singer notices a deafening silence from Reformers, who say nothing in response to the nation’s first charter chain strike in Chicago. Come to think of it, the Reformers were silent last spring, during the historic Teacher Revolt in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Co,orado, Noth Carolina, and Arizona.
Are the Reformers on the side of teachers who want smaller classes and a decent salary? No se.
Singer writes:
Charter school teachers in Chicago are in their fourth day of a strike.
Yet I wonder why the leaders of the charter movement are quiet.
Where is Peter Cunningham of the Education Post?
Where is Shaver Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform?
Not a word from Campbell Brown or Michelle Rhee?
Nothing from Bill Gates, Cory Booker, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?
Not a peep from Betsy DeVos or Donald Trump?
This is a historic moment. Teachers at various charter schools have unionized before, but it has never come to an outright strike – not once since the federal charter school law was established in 1994.
You’d think the charter cheerleaders – the folks who lobby for this type of school above every other type – would have something to say.
But no.
They are conspicuously silent.
I wonder why.
Could it be that this is not what they imagined when they pushed for schools to be privately run but publicly financed?
Could it be that they never intended workers at these schools to have any rights?
Could it be that small class size – one of the main demands of teachers at the 15 Acero schools – was never something these policymakers intended?
It certainly seems so.
Here is the answer, Steven. Charters were funded to kill unions. You guessed it. Now you know it.
The Unity Charter School suddenly closed, without any advance notice to parents, students, or teachers.
Parents at Unity Charter School are having to look for new arrangements for their children after the school suddenly closed Thursday and is being foreclosed on. Parents received an automated message Wednesday evening reporting that there would be no school Thursday, due to circumstances beyond their control. Calls and emails to the school on Thursday received no response.
A bank foreclosed on the property for nonpayment on the mortgage. The property will be auctioned off in a few weeks.
School leaders had some personal financial issues involving misuse of school funds that turned up in an audit last year, but none rose to the level of criminal acts.
Isn’t “School Choice” wonderful (not)?
Charter schools open and close like day lilies. The entrepreneurs lobby legislators to get money and tax breaks. They pay teachers as little as they have to. They siphon money away from public schools, which are stable fixtures in their community.
And the Florida Legislature, controlled by choice zealots and by people who have a direct financial interest in charters, are diverting more money away from real public schools to benefit charters. Nearly half the charters in the state are now run by for-profit operators.
Real public schools don’t close without a struggle to keep them open. Real public schools are the heart of their community. Real public schools don’t close on a whim of their corporate owner, because they are public schools, not charter schools.
Make no mistake: the growth of the charter sector in Florida is driven by greed, not by the needs of children.
#GreedNotNeed
This is a heartening article posted by BardMAT program in Los Angeles.
Those of us who feared that the younger generation would become indoctrinated into reform ideology can take heart. They have maintained their sense of balance and their ethics.
Read this article.
Let’s consider why so many young educators today are in open rebellion.
How did we lose patience with politicians and policymakers who dominated the education reform debate for more than a generation? ……
Recall first that both political parties called us “a nation at risk,” fretted endlessly that we “leave no child behind,” and required us to compete in their “race to the top.”
They told us our problems could be solved if we “teach for America,” introduce “disruptive technology,” and ditch the textbook to become “real world,” 21st century, “college and career ready.”
They condemned community public schools for not letting parents “choose,” but promptly mandated a top-down “common core” curriculum. They flooded us with standardized tests guaranteeing “accountability.” They fetishized choice, chopped up high schools, and re-stigmatized racial integration.
They blamed students who lacked “grit,” teachers who sought tenure, and parents who knew too much. They declared school funding wasn’t the problem, elected school boards are obstacles, and philanthropists know best.
They told us the same public schools that once inspired great poetry, art, and music, put us on the moon, and initiated several civil rights movements needed to be split, gutted, or shuttered.
They invented new school names like “Green Renaissance College-Prep Academy for Character, the Arts, and Scientific Careers” and “Hope-Horizon Enterprise Charter Preparatory School for New STEM Futures.” They replaced the district superintendent with the “Chief Educational Officer.”
They published self-fulfilling prophecies connecting zip-coded school ratings, teacher performance scores, and real estate values. They accepted Brown v. Board as skin-deep, not as an essential mandate for democracy.
They implied “critical thinking” was possible without the Humanities, that STEM alone makes us vocationally relevant, and that “coding” should replace recess time.They cut teacher pay, lowered employment qualifications, and peddled the myth anyone can teach.
They celebrated school recycling programs that left consumption unquestioned, gave lip-service to “student-centered civic engagement” while stifling protest, and talked up “multiple intelligences” while defunding the arts.
They expected their critics to look beyond poverty, inequality, residential segregation, mass incarceration, homelessness, and college debt to focus instead on a few heartwarming (and yes, legitimate) stories of student resilience and pluck.
They expected us to believe that a lazy public-school teacher whose students fail to make “adequate yearly progress” on tests was endemic but that an administrator bilking an online academy or for-profit charter school was “one bad apple.”
They designed education conferences on “data-driven instruction,” “rigorous assessment,” and “differentiated learning” but showed little patience for studies that correlate student performance with poverty, trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the decimation of community schools.
They promised new classroom technology to bridge the “digital divide” between rich, poor, urban, and rural, as they consolidated corporate headquarters in a few elite cities. They advertised now-debunked “value-added” standardized testing for stockholder gain as teacher salaries stagnated.
They preached “cooperative learning” while sending their own kids to private schools. They saw alma mater endowments balloon while donating little to the places where most Americans earn degrees. They published op-eds to end affirmative action but still checked the legacy box on college applications.
They were legitimately surprised when thousands of teachers in the reddest, least unionized states walked out of class last year.
Meanwhile……
The No Child Left Behind generation continues to bear the full weight of this malpractice, paying a step price for today’s parallel rise in ignorance and intolerance.
We are the children of the education reformer’s empty promises. We watched the few decide for the many how schools should operate. We saw celebrated new technologies outpace civic capacity and moral imagination. We have reason to doubt.
We are are the inheritors of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” We have watched democratic institutions crumble, conspiracy thinking mainstreamed, and authoritarianism normalized. We have seen climate change denied at the highest level of government.
We still see too many of our black brothers and sisters targeted by law enforcement. We have seen our neighbor’s promised DACA protections rescinded and watched deporters break down their doors. We see basic human rights for our LGBTQ peers refused in the name of “science.”
We have seen the “Southern strategy” deprive rural red state voters of educational opportunity before dividing, exploiting, and dog whistling. We hear climate science mocked and watched women’s freedom marched backwards. We hear mental health discussed only after school shootings.
We’ve watched two endless wars and saw deployed family members and friends miss out on college. Even the battles we don’t see remind us that that bombs inevitably fall on schools. We know know war imposes a deadly opportunity tax on the youngest of civilians and female teachers.
Against this backdrop we recall how reformers caricatured our teachers as overpaid, summer-loving, and entitled. We resent how our hard-working mentors were demoralized and forced into resignation or early retirement.
Our collective experience is precisely why we aren’t ideologues. We know the issues are complex. And unlike the reformers, we don’t claim to have the answers. We simply believe that education can and must be more humane than this. We plan to make it so.
We learned most from the warrior educators who saw through the reform facade. These heroes breathed life into institutions, energized our classrooms, reminded us what we are worth, and pointed us in new directions. We plan to become these educators too.
Bravo! Brava!
Jeb Bush, the puppet-master of corporate reform, is convening his annual “summit” of people who support his love of charters and vouchers. The queen of school choice is the superstar of the event: Eva Moskowitz.
Peruse the agenda to see who supports Jeb Bush’s efforts to privatize public education.
The registration fee is $649, enough to keep out the riffraff.
Thanks to Guy Brandenburg for directing me to this fascinating post about what happens when private corporations take over government services, in this case, reporting the weather.
Restore Reason writes about the commercialization of weather reporting and draws a parallel with charter schools and vouchers. Please open the link and read the entire post.
I just listened to “The Coming Storm”, by Michael Lewis. I didn’t carefully read the description before diving in, and thought it would inform me about the increasing violence of weather. Rather, I learned about the privatization of weather, or at least the reporting of it, and the Department of Commerce.
Turns out, the Department of Commerce has little to do with commerce and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. Rather, it runs the U.S. Census, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over half of its $9B budget though, is spent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to figure out the weather. And figuring out the weather, is largely about collecting data. “Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.” One senior policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration, said the Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Science and Technology. When he mentioned this to Wilbur Ross, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department, Ross said, “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that.” Unfortunately for all of us, Ross also wasn’t interested in finding someone who would do it for him.
In October 2017, Barry Myers, a lawyer who founded and ran AccuWeather, was nominated to serve as the head of the NOAA. This is a guy who in the 1990s, argued the NWS should be forbidden (except in cases where human life and property was at stake) from delivering any weather-related knowledge to Americans who might be a consumer of AccuWeather products. “The National Weather Service” Myers said, “does not need to have the final say on warnings…the government should get out of the forecasting business.”
Then in 2005, Senator Rick Santorum (a recipient of Myers family contributions) introduced a bill to basically eliminate the National Weather Service’s ability to communicate with the public. Lewis asks his readers to “consider the audacity of that manuever. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”
It was at this point in my listening that I began to think how this privatization story was paralleling that of education’s. In both cases, those in the public sector are in it for the mission, not the money. In both cases, the private sector only “wins” if the public sector “loses”. In both cases, it is in the interest of the private sector to facilitate the failure of the public sector or make it look like it is failing.
Just as private and charter schools profit when district schools are perceived to be of lower quality, Barry Myers has worked hard to make government provided weather services look inferior to that which the private sector can provide. As Lewis points out, “The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more people will pay for warning of them. The more people stand to lose, the more money they will be inclined to pay. The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain over the political process.”
This is the beginning of a thoughtful post. Please read it.
Sue Legg, the former director of education for Florida’s League of Women Voters, wrote this series at my request. She was assessment and evaluation contractor for the Fl. DOE for twenty years while on the faculty at the University of Florida. This is part 2.
Twenty Years Later: Impact of Charter and Private Sector Schools
With support from the state, charter and private schools enroll 22% of Florida’s three million children. Charters receive the same per student funding as regular public schools. Private schools receive tax credit scholarships to avoid Florida’s constitutional ban on vouchers funded directly by the legislature.
Nearly half of Florida’s 655 charters are run by for-profit management firms dominated by two firms: Academica and Charter Schools USA (CSUSA).
In 2016, In the Public Interest reported that Academica’s real estate arm controls more than $155 million in south Florida real estate. They essentially own the property for half of their schools and lease it to themselves through the non-profit charter boards they establish. Some of its charters pay exorbitant leases to the Catholic church or other religious entities. Using church facilities is not illegal if there is no religious instruction or other artifacts in classrooms.
CSUSA operates in a similar manner. CSUSA has its own real estate company. We tracked the history of one such school and found that CSUSA had purchased a former ATT call center for about $1.2 million. They flipped the building several times to have the property reappraised, and invested $1.5 million in air conditioning etc. The final appraisal was for $9 million, and the CSUSA board signed an escalating lease for over a million dollars per year which would in time surpass the school budget. Teachers are paid from the remaining budget which seldom allows for retirement or health benefits. Thus, teacher turnover tends to be more than double the rate for traditional public schools.
In 2016, the U.S. Office of the Inspector General delineated the similarities between charter financing and the subprime loan crisis that wreaked havoc with the housing industry. Real estate loans have minimal annual payments with large balloon payments when the loan becomes due.
Independently run charters survive at first on start up funds from the state and federal government. Even though charters are exempt from the regulations governing the quality of school facilities, many complain they are underfunded. Some are housed in abandoned strip malls or former business locations that need remodeling.
The lack of regulation was supposed to spur innovation. Charters must meet local fire and safety codes, employ teachers who are certified within 18 months, and administer state assessments. Otherwise, they are exempt from operational district oversight and state school facilities codes. District school boards can only intervene if charters cannot pay their bills or they receive failing grades two years in a row on the state assessment tests. There is no limit on charter expansion, and the State Board of Education may overrule, and does, proposals that are not approved locally.
Where does this lack of regulation lead? The simple answer is profiteering, corruption and closures. The management of Newpoint charters is the current scandal. The company has been charged with racketeering involving 57 million dollars in the operation of its 15 schools. Investigative reporting by the Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, and Tampa Bay Times have documented many other scandals in which charters close without warning, funds are collected for unenrolled students,
Charters close at an alarming rate. At least 373 Florida charters closed in the last twenty years. They take the money with them. Even some proponents of charters are having doubts.
Parents are finding out the hard way that they have no voice in charter school management. Erika Donalds, a former school board member whose husband is a legislator, sponsored the doomed constitutional amendment 8 to create a separate charter system. She also co-founded one of the Classical Academies where she was a board member. The charter was based on ‘Christian values’, but had a principal who created an environment “where fraud can occur without detection”. Donalds withdrew her children. She has, however, formed an alliance with the wife of the 2017 Florida Senate president to open another Classical Academy.
Past attempts by some legislators to limit the ‘self-dealing’ and profiteering failed. In September 2018, Integrity-Florida released its latest report on needed reforms. Millions of tax payer dollars have been lost to both excessive profits and criminal misuse of funds. Legislation is needed to require a justification for opening a charter and improved regulation to prevent profiteering. At least now, the public is growing aware of the financial threats to our public schools. No longer is the problem ‘over there’. It is affecting everyone.
John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, shares his thoughts about the Network for Public Education Conference in Indianapolis. He begins by trying to wrap his brain around my provocative claim that “We are winning.” After I received his post, I explained to him that everything the Reformers have tried has failed. Every promise they have made has been broken. They have run American education for a decade or a generation, depending on when you start counting, and they have nothing to show for it. I contend there is no “reform movement.” There is instead a significant number of incredibly rich men and women playing with the lives of others. The Billionaire Boys Club, plus Alice Walton, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a few other women. This is no social movement. A genuine movement has grassroots. The Reformers have none; they have only paid staff. If the money dried up, the “reform movement” would disappear. It has no troops. None. Genuine movements are built by dedicated, passionate volunteers. That’s what we have.
Thompson writes:
The Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was awesome. It will take me awhile to wrestle with the information about the “David versus Goliath” battle which is leading to the defeat of corporate school reform. But I will start by thinking through the lessons learned from retired PBS education reporter John Merrow and Jim Harvey, who was a senior staff member of the National Commission on Excellence in Education and the principle author of “A Nation at Risk.” Harvey is now executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable.
Merrow explained that charters are producing “a scandal a day.” Using the type of turn of a phrase for which he is well known, Merrow said that charters have had “too much attention but not enough scrutiny.” He says that some mom and pop charters are excellent, but online charters should be outlawed. Then he punched holes in the charter-advocates’ claim that rigorous accountability systems could minimize the downsides of charters.
Merrow says that one reason why it isn’t really possible to scrutinize the costs of charters is that there is no longer a real difference between for-profit and nonprofit charters. Choice has created a system of “buyer beware.”
Harvey added that journalists have been accused of cherry-picking charter scandal reports but “there are so many cherries.” Then he recounted inside stories on the writing of the infamous “A Nation at Risk” and how the report was “hijacked,” as he provided insights into how corporate school reform spun out of control.
As Harvey and Merrow discussed, before the report it was difficult to get the press to focus on the classroom. Conflicts over busing to desegregate schools would get the public’s attention, but Harvey didn’t think that “A Nation at Risk” would attract much of an audience. He thought that the key sentence in the opening paragraph hit a balance. The sentence began with the statement that the American people “can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people,” and the paragraph concluded with, “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. “
Had it not been for manipulations of the report by those who were driven by a political agenda, the words in the middle could have been read as intended. Harvey wrote, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Harvey didn’t write the extreme statement that followed. In fact, he had edited out the sentence, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Clearly the report became part of an attack on public education. In contrast to the social science which preceded it, and the research that experts like Harvey embraced, the campaign kicked off by “A Nation at Risk” blamed schools, not overall changes in society that resulted in some lowered test scores. NAEP scores were also misrepresented by categories,like “proficiency,” which facilitated falsehoods such as the idea that tests showed that 60 percent of students were below grade level.
President Ronald Reagan announced the report along with the false statement that “A Nation at Risk” included a call for prayer in the schools, school vouchers, and the abolition of the Department of Education. Then, as Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, it was clear that the report was being used demonize not just teachers but government itself.
And that leads to the emergence of venture philanthropy in the 1990s. As Merrow recalled, during and before the 1980s, donors such as Ford and Annenberg foundations tinkered around the edges in seeking answers to complex conundrums. They offered money without micromanaging school improvement. Since then, technocratic school reform was driven, in large part, by the Billionaires Boys’ Club. It “weaponized” testing in an assault on public schools.
Harvey attributed that unfortunate transition, in significant part, to the realization that education is a $750 billion industry with profits to be made. It attracted 25-year-olds who knew nothing about education, and soon they were running policy.
Had corporate reformers taken the time to scrutinize the evidence, they would have had to confront the research which existed before and after “A Nation at Risk,” and that its author respected. As Harvey and David Berliner have written, an evidenced-informed investigation would have considered “the 80 percent of their waking hours that students spend outside the school walls.” Had they looked at evidence, edu-philanthropists should have understood the need to “provide adequate health care for children and a living wage for working parents, along with affordable day-care.”
Whether we are talking about the obsession with test and punish micromanaging or the faith in charters, corporate reformers failed to consider the complexities of the school systems they sought to transform. But, they did their homework in terms of public relations. In addition to demonizing teachers, public schools, and other public sectors, corporate reformers stole the language of dedicated educators and civil rights. They’ve presented their teacher-bashing and privatization campaigns as a “civil rights” movement.
Educators must reclaim our language, and craft messages for a new, constructive, holistic campaign to improve schools. One step toward new conversations requires us to learn from the past. John Merrow and Jim Harvey are remarkable sources of institutional history and the wisdom required for the type of discussions that are necessary.
If you live in New Hampshire, please support public education by voting for Molly Kelly for Governor.
Chris Sununu is a clone of Betsy DeVos. Maybe they were separated at birth.
He wants to finance charter schools and vouchers, at the e Penske of your public schools.
Sununu appointed a home-schooling businessman to Commissioner of Education.
He has supported ALEC model legislation to introduce vouchers.
He signed a bill to take away the voting rights of out-of-state college students.
Teacher-voters need to turn out in force to flip the legislature and vote Kelly into office.
It can be a new day in New Hampshire, but only if you VOTE.
The National Education Policy Center interviewed Bruce Baker about his review of a much-ballyhooed study of the impact of market forces in the New Orleans schools.
The Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a study last July declaring that the privatization of almost every school in New Orleans was a great success. That very day, Betsy DeVos gave $10 Million to ERA to become a federally-funded National Center on School Choice. The report was written by Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen.
Bruce Baker, a researcher at Rutgers University, has studied charter schools, school funding and equity for years. He was commissioned by NPE to review the ERA study.
His conclusion: Harris and Larsen had minimized the importance of demographic changes following the hurricane and the enormous influx of new funding. These changes alone, he said, could have accounted for the effects in New Orleans documented by the ERA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 